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The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview (BSI) project is a long-term sociolinguistic project aiming to provide solid empirical data about the language varieties spoken in Budapest. A large body of tape recorded data was collected in a carefully compiled sociolinguistic interview which was administered to a representative sample of Budapest speakers. The BSI data collection took place in two phases. After an initial test version, termed BSI version 1, the first full scale investigation, BSI version 2, was conducted in 1987. 50 pilot interviews were made with a quota sample of ten teachers over 50 years of age, ten university students, ten blue-collar workers, ten sales clerks, and ten vocational trainees aged 15-16.
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The sociolinguistic variables involved in the survey included a range of
phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical phenomena. Their
selection, which was partially based on suggestions made by linguist
colleagues in response to a questionnaire, was motivated broadly by two
reasons. (1) The majority of reseach topics were selected because they
had been the subject of various statements in the literature without
adequate empirical data adduced in support of the claims. Such issues
included, for example, claims about the alleged effect of typewritten
texts on vowel length. (2) Some variables were included because they displayed
variation that was little understood and thus called for empirical
observation.
A further factor in the selection of variables was the
suitability of the interview format to investigate the particular
phenomenon. For the examination of some questions the face-to-face
interview situation was simply unsuitable.
The BSI used a number of different tasks.
They were devised with a view to creating situations
in which informants produced data at different speech tempo and under
varying levels of self-awareness
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Included below is a short summary of the tasks deployed in the interview.
Kontra - Váradi 1997 gives a full account of the sociolinguistic
variables and the methodology used, Váradi 1998 contains a detailed guide
to all the data derived from BSI version 2. Table 1.1 shows
a brief typology of the tasks according to the expected activity of the
informants. This is followed by a short summary of the
various types of BSI tasks. First the tasks administered with the aid of
index cards are described and then the guided conversations will be
discussed.
| activity | description | self-monitoring |
| production | oral sentence completion (written clue) | 2 |
| reading passages (slow) | 4 | |
| reading passages (fast) | 5 | |
| reading minimal pairs | 1 | |
| reading word list | 1 | |
| word elicitation | 2 | |
| oral sentence completion (no clue) | 2 | |
| the reporter's test | 4 | |
| the staple remover test | 5 | |
| judgement | ``Same or different ...'' | n/a |
| ''Which is correct ...'' | n/a | |
| ``How do YOU SAY IT?'' | n/a |
In this type of tests informants were given a card which showed a sentence with a word missing and in the lower right corner it had a word printed separately. Informants were asked to insert the word in the sentence and read out the full sentence. For example:
Én tegnap nem ... elegetALSZIK
The task is similar to the word insertion task above in that informants are asked to produce a full sentence by inserting a missing word but this time the test is done entirely orally. The field worker reads out the sentence frame and asks the informant to supply the missing word and pronounce the full sentence aloud. For example:
Sok mindenre emlékszem, ... gyerekkoromban történt.
`I remember a lot of things, ... happened in my childhood'
The field worker pronounces the above sentence frame to the informant and encourages the informant to guess the missing word and repeat the sentence with the word inserted in the sentence i. e. Sok mindenre emlékszem,ami gyerekkoromban történt.
This technique is familiar from traditional dialectologist field work. Lexical data are elicited by means of a question, which should be answered with a single word. For example:
Melyik az a szó, amelyiknek vécé a jelentése de k-val kezdodik?This task also includes sentence frames but they are read out to the informants by the field workers and the informants are expected to guess and produce only the missing word. For example:
'Which is the word that means loo but begins with a k '
A Földön már több mint 5 milliárd ... él.In this case, informants are supposed to utter the word ember `man'
`There are already more than 5 billion ... in the world'.
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A card with a typewritten passage was given to the informants. They were asked to read them through in silence then read them out as if to a friend of theirs who could not read because of a recent eye operation. Afterwards, they were asked to read the same passage again, this time as fast as they could. Altogether seven passages were used in this way. They were carefully made-up texts containing a high concentration of the variables that were tested in other parts of the interview as well. Every effort was made to ensure that they made coherent, natural flowing passages nevertheless.
20 cards each showing a minimal pair were given to the informant, who were asked to read them out. Not all the pairs constituted 'minimal pairs' in the technical sense of the term generally used in the linguistic literature such as for example lombtalanít - lomtalanít . Other pairs, such as ezerszer - ezeregyszer were featured for their suitability to elicit data on the e - ë variable in a highly compact manner. Whatever their technical status, however, all the pairs contained words that were very similar to each other.
Here again, informants were asked to read out separate words. The difference to the minimal pairs task was that the words were in groups of five or six written under each other on a card and they represented a rather mixed bag. One card, for example, contained the following words:
injekció, ember, erdobe, bontsd föl, egyszer
Informants were asked to give a running commentary of what the field worker was doing. They were trained in the test example to use verbs in the the present tense third person singular form. Field workers were instructed to carry out small actions like opening and then closing a window eliciting forms like kinyitja/kinyissa 'standard gloss: opens/should open'.
In these tasks informants were asked directly their opinion on matters of language use. As a matter of fact the first three in the list below did not even involve any speaking at all. Instead, their response consisted in filling out a questionnaire.
Informants were asked to listen to pairs of words recorded on cassette tape
and played back to them on Walkman type cassette players through
earphones. They had to fill out a questionnaire circling either the letter
A if they thought the two words were identical or the letter K
if they thought them different.
The set-up was identical to the previous task except that here informants had to decide which of the pair of words played on the tape were correct. Their choices were recorded on the questionnaire sheet by circling the number one if they thought they thought the first item heard was correct, number two otherwise.
Again, pairs of words were played on the cassette player to the informants. They were asked to circle round number one if they used the first variant, number two if the second. All the items in this task investigated some phonological phenomenon.
This brief task is designed to record the perceived meaning of the word demogr fia , which was currently undergoing modification in that a new meaning (birth control, family planning) was complementing or even supplanting the original sense of the word.
This test also serves to document undergoing change in vocabulary. The staple removal is a gadget that was practically unknown at the time the interview was conducted. This part of the interview tested how people coped with naming a device they had not come across before. It consisted of a series of exchanges in which the field worker showed the device to the informants, tried to make them guess what its use was and finally got the informants to name the thing.
Each BSI interview was required to contain at least 30 minutes of guided conversations. The BSI protocol contained a wide repertoire of conversation modules , i.e. conversations that revolved around a loose topic such as street crime, one's childhood etc. The set of conversation modules used in a BSI interview was largely left to the discretion of the field workers except that there were some modules which had to be used in each interview. Some interview even had to be introduced with the given words repeated verbatim. The field workers were instructed to engage the informants in natural flowing conversation that seemed to them spontaneous and conducted about topics that interested them. As far as the guided conversation part is concerned, each interview contains a core set and an unpredictible medley of conversation modules chosen out of the recommended set listed below.
All the questions below were obligatory to raise:
What was your childhood like?
Was there ever a moment in your life when it seemed that your life was in serious danger or that you might be seriously injured? When you thought ``That's it. Curtains''.[If yes] What happened?
Surely, there were incidents in your life where something or somebody must have frightened you. What happened?
When were you last asked what religion you had? What did you say? Is it important that somebody is religious or not? Why?
In Czechoslovakia women need no permit to have an abortion if they do not want to have a child. In Hungary, this is subject to a licence, therefore a woman can't freely decide whether to have a child or not. Which solution do you sympathise with, the Czechoslovakian or the Hungarian? Why?
Are nuclear plants needed? Why?
Do you like jokes? (If yes) Can you tell one you heard recently and think it's good?Alternatively: Please tell me the joke that you consider the best you ever heard.
did you get comments from locals like you speak in a funny
way? Once a schoolgirl from Budapest moved to Debrecen and
their classmates told her she was putting on airs. Has
anything like this happened to you? What exactly?
Is there anything that I have not asked you about but you would have liked to talk about?
==1 Kontra, Mikl¢s. 1995. On current research into spoken Hungarian. International Journal of the Sociology of Language # 111:5-20.
==1 Kontra, Mikl¢s & Tam s V radi. 1997. The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview: Version 3. (Working Papers in Hungarian Sociolinguistics No 2, January 1998). Budapest: Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 54 pp.
==1 Pintzuk, Susan; Mikl¢s Kontra; Kl ra S ndor; Anna Borbly, 1995. The effect of the typewriter on Hungarian reading style. (Working Papers in Hungarian Sociolinguistics No 1, September 1995). Budapest: Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 30 pp.
==1 V radi, Tam s 1994. Hesitations between Inessive and Illative Forms in Hungarian (-ba and -ban ). Studies in Applied Linguistics 1:123-140. [Debrecen]
==1 - 1995/1996. Stylistic variation and the (bVn) variable in the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 43:295-309.
==1 - 1998. Manual of The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview Data (Working Papers in Hungarian Sociolinguistics No 4, January 1998). Budapest: Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 101 pp.